Is SmartThings still in business?

General Discussion
15

off the top of my head, some new features i can think of from the past 8 months (i think):

  1. ability to remove zigbee (i think) devices without deleting from the smart app first
  2. low battery icon on the device icon in the app
  3. routines added to Alexa
  4. Ring integration
  5. Arlo integration
  6. iris oc and motion fingerprints added to stock handlers to enable running locally
  7. improved stability
  8. OTA updates for ST devices, with more beta testing
  9. zigbee secure inclusion

probably forgetting more. So i’m not sure where you aren’t seeing changes/improvements/updates.

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16
  1. Google Home integration
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18
  1. Lutron Caseta support coming soon. Thank You!!
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19

Tim, you do realize that those weekly blogs, e.g., haven’t happened in six months. I’m not so sure stagnation is just in the eye of the beholder!

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20

Yeah, I can just see the charts…

  • Bugs are up 20%!
  • Complaints are up 10%
  • Sales are up due to increased marketing spend, and therefore we can take credit that…
  • Returns are up 25%
  • Inquiries about Alex’s missing posts are down from Oct-Dec, but up from 2015 as a whole!
  • Hiring of maintenance engineers is up 100%! (We hired two to replace the one who quit.)
  • SHM false alarms are a significant growth area for us

SHM got so bad that in December I turned it off entirely.

Remember Rules Engine? You guys killed that pretty effectively. My own submission, for LANNouncer, you dropped silently after seven months. (The project is still alive, but not integrated. Website for the curious.)

I hear you when you say you can’t tell us anything, but what happened to the Alex posts? Why is the platform still having “availability” issues regularly?

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21

The existence of a future-oriented/installed-base-prioritized backup/migration options would actually demonstrate long term commitment to this market segment and its customers. Not prioritizing that makes it look much more like Samsung is still just dating, and is not gonna “put a ring on it” yet. :slight_smile:

Samsung is a VERY large company…like any other similarly large company, 200 employees in an of itself isn’t an indication of future commitment (or a lack thereof). In large consumer electronic company layoffs of thousands have not been uncommon (sadly), and reassigning 200 employees to other teams/activities is always an option.

Show me the money…

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22

@NWTony, that’s a great question! With the outage that started in December and continues today, (tomorrow will be about 7 weeks since we went “dark”), there are a bunch of us over on this thread wondering if SmartThings has pulled the plug on the cloud service, just like others that have gone dark.

Today I started shopping for alternatives. Might even go to the old-school, built like a tank products that have stood the test of time.

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23

@TracySmith I’m in the same.boat. Even more annoying is that SmartThings of their own admission does not monitor these forums at all, so they just turn a blind eye to all of us.

I am also looking into alternatives. The Wink looks like it is improved since I last tried it, so I may give it another shot (also easy return to Home Depot if it doesn’t work out). If that doesn’t work I am probably going to buy a ZWave USB and build my own device with a raspberry pi and OpenHab or similar software.

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24

@Jason_Keirstead, I’m looking into several but might go old-school and check out HomeSeer. Its more technical than I want to be, but if I slow down and take some time I can build exactly what I need. I would be interested in hearing your experience with Wink, too (PM is fine so as to not hijack the thread). If ST gets this fixed in the next few days, they may be able to salvage what little trust I have left, but once I start moving things to an alternate platform and get it working, chances of staying/coming back are slimmer and slimmer.

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26

I haven’t had the problems you are talking about. My biggest problem is the IDE takes a very long time to load and sometimes it times out. They are aware of it and are working to resolve it. All my automations work, so I have no big complaints yet.

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27

Tim,

I have a lot of respect for you but those kind of posts do you a huge disservice. By stating that stability can be innvovative you are effectively agreeing with my point. Since we do not have feature innovation, and since many of us have no real stability, there is in fact no innovation taking place.

Many people have called you and other staffers out about Alex’s disappearance from the forum and the lack of promised weekly updates. How about you directly address that, right here, right now, once and for all, for everyone to see?? I challenge you and the rest of the ST team to give us all a reason why that stopped happened and why Alex is gone from the forum.

Better yet, how about Alex come here and directly address the community, right on this thread. Can you make that happen???

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28

I’d really be interested in knowing some real numbers rather than anecdotal numbers on the platform’s stabilty. Lots of people have reported stability issues, lots of people have reported no significant issues (at least in the last 6 months). No platform has 100% uptime and reliability. In fact, in my experience, even “commercial” SaaS platforms typically have at most 99.9% uptime in their SLAs. It sucks when you’re the one who is affected by the 0.1% of the time when the perform isn’t working, but from a purely business standpoint solving for that last 0.1% just doesn’t make sense. I have no idea if SmartThings is anywhere near 99.9% or not. I wonder if they’d be willing to share their internal numbers on that.

29

I would like to see the metrics too but the truth is I really do not care about platform metrics, I care about my system. It does not surprise me to find apologists like yourself here. I encountered this in the Iris community. The funny thing is that a year later those people are still apologizing for the actions of a company whom they have no ties with. I see the same trends here.

Since just about everything runs in the cloud, we have a common platform and therefore my system is not running in some unique configuration. It is therefore not unreasonable nor statistically inaccurate to draw a conclusion that the high number of failures I am seeing, while potentially concentrated to a specific platform feature (i.e. Routines) which I use a lot of, are more widespread. Statically I likely use a lot of routines therefore I can expect to experience more problems, but the fact is Routines still fail around 80% of executions.

Usually in software development repeated, clustered failure events are tracked and given a high level of scrutiny. In this case I and others have repeatedly signaled problems specifically with routines and device communication and almost 2 months later nothing is done and there has barely even been an acknowledgement. For all I know that Issue #233 on the fix list. It would be nice to know where the issue stands in the break-fix list because it will likely make or break my choice to stay with ST and also whether I ever buy another Samsung product again.

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30

So did ou have device communication problems with Iris AND SmartThings?

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[quote=“Michael_Shutt, post:28, topic:74650, full:true”]I’d really be interested in knowing some real numbers rather than anecdotal numbers on the platform’s stabilty. … In fact, in my experience, even “commercial” SaaS platforms typically have at most 99.9% uptime in their SLAs. …I have no idea if SmartThings is anywhere near 99.9% or not. I wonder if they’d be willing to share their internal numbers on that.
[/quote]
Most SaaS contracts I’ve seen specify four-to-five nines. Which is much better than you’ve seen. And of course it depends on how you measure it; typically it’s measured for the total service - i.e. the integrated deliverable, while historically ST has counted periods where SHM didn’t work or devices weren’t responding as not so much down as slightly depressed. So it is a question of how “up” is needed to be up.
Of course, using their recent cheery language, they’d probably say, “We have three-nines reliability! Yeah, it’s 65.999%, but there are three nines there!”

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32

In simple, i think what EVERYONE who has invested money and time into your platform is saying to you (and i know your all reading this, not just @slagle, or atleast id hope so) is fairly obvious and you would be foolish not to respond asap as its becoming the most common post on this community, just reworded in a 101 ways…

START COMMUNICATING MORE WITH YOUR CORE FOLLOWING, WE ARE LOOSING INTEREST IN YOU BECAUSE IT FEELS LIKE YOU DONT EXIST ANYMORE SIMPLY DUE TO YOUR LACK OF “COMMUNICATION”…

COMMUNICATE AND INSPIRE US AND WE WILL REMAIN LOYAL AND CREATIVE… WE CANT ALL KEEP DEVELOPING ON TOP OF THIS PLATFORM TOGETHER MAKING GREAT SOLUTIONS IF YOU DONT HELP US, MAKE FEEL INCLUDED, APPRECIATED & INSPIRED… HOW CAN WE GET EXCITED ABOUT MAKING SOLUTIONS AS A DEVELOPER COMMUNITY FOR A PLATFORM THAT CANT EVEN ANSWER BASIC QUESTIONS ABOUT THEMSELVES.

STOP SHUTTING US OUT AND GIVING US SHORT BLUNT AND DISMISSIVE “WE CANT SAY” ANSWERS TO EVERYTHING… DONT CLAIM TO BE THE WORLDS MOST “OPEN” PLATFORM AND THEN CLOSE EVERYONE OUT WHO WANTS TO HELP PUSH YOU FORWARD…

COMMUNICATION IS KEY:

1.) dev calls are a shadow of there former selves and obviously no longer a priority.

2.) alex’s commitment to weekly post updates to keep us on the ball - obsolete after 5 weeks.

I THINK YOU ARE WEEKS AWAY FROM A 110% BACKLASH FROM MAJOR ST COMMUNITY DEVELOPERS LOOSING FULL INTEREST AND STOPPING SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR CONTRBUTIONS TO YOUR PLATFORM, ITS CLEAR FROM THE WAY ALL THE MAJOR DEVS AND THINKERS ON HERE TALK ABOUT YOU NOW AS A POSE TO HOW THEY DID 2 YEARS AGO.

COMMUNITY MORALE IS AT AN ALL TIME LOW !!!

Its time to enter the public spotlight and answer some questions, re-evaluate your communication paths to devs and the community and relight the fire in us all before you loose great, creative and passionate supporters.

However i wont hold my breath and i will expect a generic reply to the only sections of this you can joggle to your advantage ignoring the core facts and issues ive pointed out alike many others before me.

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33

Lol, didn’t realize that I was “apologizing” for anyone. I was trying to suggest that if ST is truly innovating on the stability of the system, providing some measure of the results would be helpful. Without that, we can only extrapolate from what we see here.

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34

They have shared some stats on system performance improvements.

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35

That’s a good start, thanks for pointing that post out. Those stats are encouraging, but really only speak to the responsiveness of the platform when it’s working (presumably). I would hope they have a way to monitor when functional areas of the system are working correctly. For example, metrics on automation routines succeeding or failing. Doesn’t really matter if a routine executes quickly if it doesn’t actually accomplish what it’s supposed to.

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36

Have you stopped for a second and thought this just might be their desired outcome? Lose the advanced community dev and unlimited access to their platform, in return they get a stable platform for the long tail simple users?

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